Understanding The Power Of Surrender With Bob Bisanz
Sometimes, the straight path to healing is by getting rid of the grind and letting go of everything on your plate. In this episode, Fr. Jim Swarthout sits down with Bob Bisanz, an alcoholic who got sober in 1967 through the power of surrender. Together, they discuss how the retreat center in Wyzetta perfectly combines the 12-step recovery program and a Christ-centered approach to healing. Bob talks about serving others while recovering by eliminating all your internal baggage and opening up to the spiritual guidance of God.
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Understanding The Power Of Surrender With Bob Bisanz
We’re here on the beautiful campus at The Retreat here in Wayzata. I’m sitting here with Bob. Bob is going to talk to us a little about The Retreat and how it has affected his life here in the recovery situation that we may have. This is the first episode that we’re having that is presented by The Retreat here in Wayzata on a beautiful campus and beautiful surroundings here in Minnesota.
Thank you, Bob, for being here.
Thank you for having me. My name is Bob. I’m an alcoholic. I got sober in 1967 and have been a very active member of AA. Due to my activity in recovery, I served on different boards and different things. My spiritual advisor is a spiritual father of The Retreat. His name was Dr. George Mann. He opened St. Mary’s Hospital and was a medical director there for 25 or 30 years. His wife was a long-time-in-recovery lady. They’re close friends. He was my spiritual director.
At one time, Minnesota had 8,000 beds for the treatment of alcoholism. That had fallen to about 3,000. The cost, when my business partner went to Hazel, was $250. Now, it’s $40,000. George called a group of us together. There were about twenty of us. It was like a board. We met for seven years trying to figure out what we could do to establish something that provided good treatment and good recovery that was twelve-step oriented. Out of that seven-year period of time of our meeting, we bought a piece of property in Minnetrista. We opened a nineteen-bed facility and started The Retreat model.
Thank you.
The most unique thing to me about The Retreat model is that our basic methodology of bringing recovery to our clients is taking them through the big book. There are so many places you can get exposed. They’ll teach you about alcoholism and tell you to go to AA. Here, we have presenters from the outside, not on staff, who come in and take people through the first 164 pages of the book over three-hour sessions three times a week.
Our goal is to be able to help people understand they’ve got chemical dependency or they’ve got alcoholism. What you do with that is you go to become an active participating member of AA. The Retreat does that as well as any place in the United States. We have meditation every day. We teach meditation when we bring people through the book. By the time they leave here, they understand what the book is, what it is about, what the steps are, and what the steps are about. They leave with a sponsor. It’s traditional, some might say old-fashioned, but a very strong and focused boutique treatment facility.
Surrender Experience
We were having lunch, and I had mentioned to you that I believe the twelve-step program or what we do here or what it’s done here at The Retreat is like when you marinate. I mentioned to you I’ll get up in the morning and I want to have a nice grilled chicken. I put that chicken in a Tupperware bucket or whatever plate, put Italian dressing on it, and let it marinate for the day. If I let it marinate for the day, it gets in there, so it tastes much better when I have mercy on Italian dressing before I put it on the grill. What we do here at The Retreat or what is done here is almost in a way marinating, but you use the word immersion a little bit. Could you explain that a little bit?
Most alcoholics, by the time they get help or are first to get help, are very isolated. We have burnt off through most of the major relationships in our lives. The only people still in our lives have to be there, and they’re captive in many ways. We have a wall built up around us. The wall says, “You like me, but you only like what’ll let you see? If you saw everything about me, you’d hate me. I hate myself.”
In essence, the very first major thing that has to happen in recovery from alcohol is a surrender experience. Our clients come in with 30 or 40 people that they’re interacting with. All of a sudden, they’re in a conversation they’ve never been in before in their lives. They’re in a conversation with honesty and depth. They’re hearing people tell things about themselves and share things about themselves, and then they start to crack open. As they start to crack open, they allow themselves which eventually ends up as a surrender experience.
You can watch guys that for the first two weeks when they’re in treatment, they’re planning how to kill their wives if they ever get out. All of a sudden, something happens in the third week. People look over and the guy that was trying to run away or the guy that was trying to get out, all of a sudden, he’s talking to the new guys, trying to keep him here. Something’s happened to him. He doesn’t even know it has happened to him. Everybody else knows. That is part of the essential change. It is not just information. It is not mental.
One of the things that’s unique about a place that is based on the twelve steps in recovery is that it doesn’t just treat the physical part of the disease. It’s physical, mental, and spiritual. For those of us who have been out, we need all three aspects of that to behold. For a lot of people, they’re not interested in the spiritual right away. We say, “Don’t worry about it. Get your front-row seat and become an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous.”
The 12-step recovery doesn’t treat the physical part of the disease. It focuses instead on the mental and spiritual aspects of one’s struggles.
The conversations in AA, the conversations that the men and women have, all of a sudden, they’re talking about God in a way that we’ve never heard them talk about God. It isn’t about what you believe. It’s about what your experience is. I don’t care what you believe. Whatever you believe is fine. In AA, we want to know what your experience is. All of a sudden, the idea of having a relationship with the God of your understanding as opposed to a belief in the God of your understanding starts to touch us in a way we haven’t been touched.
Sometimes, in our recovery, it happens often to me that I get so emotional because I know what I used to be like and where I am now. It’s a joy that comes from a sensory recovery guy who went through three different treatments. I struggled myself. All of a sudden, you realize, “I can’t control this.” You mentioned it. I beat myself up so badly. As a matter of fact, I even tell people, “If you don’t like me, get in line. It’s a mile and a half long and you’re at the end of it.” I have joy that I really wish to offer others.
Bob and I had an experience not long ago. We were sitting at lunch and some kid came over. We were finishing lunch and some young man came over with tattoos and a whole schmear on him. He looked at us and said, “I’ve been here for maybe 2 or 3 weeks. Can I please take your plates?” He talked about how important it was to be of service. He said, “Before I got here, I wouldn’t have cared less about you folks, but now, after 2 or 3 weeks, how can I help you?” He had joy in his eyes for the first time in a long time.
I never went to treatment. I called an intergroup. A man came out and made a twelve-step call on me at a restaurant.
12-Step Call
Could you explain what that Twelve-Step call is?
A Twelve-Step call is where two people who are active in recovery go talk to a person who needs some help who calls in. They’re referred to an intergroup as part of the local recovery office. Two guys, one guy with five years and one guy with five months, sat me down in a booth. I was 23. I had been in front of every kind of help a young person could be in front of, whether it be doctors, lawyers, chief psychologists, or proctologists. I’ve been in front of everybody. My family was trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with me. I had car accidents and arrests.
In a matter of an hour, simply by telling me their story, they changed my life. I went to my first meeting that night. I met my sponsor that night. I’ve been an active member. I drank one month later and three months later. After three months, I was on my honeymoon. I was married in ‘67. God bless the people. I immersed myself. I was lucky enough. In the ‘70s, when treatment started, we started to treat it like a real disease. We were diagnosing it. We started to get younger people, but most younger people were not ready for it. My gift is that I liked the AA from the moment I walked in. That is a gift. No credit to me. I was allowed to connect.
What you did is based on relationships that you never had before. You found joy with other people who struggled with themselves at one time. You found healing, hope, health, and happiness connecting with other people.
We’ve got three boys. I have been married for 56 years. We have a company with a couple of hundred employees. None of those things would’ve even been feasible without recovery.
Intimate Experience
Recovery has been good. With The Retreat, you had mentioned why it was so important. Could you share that again why?
First of all, The Retreat is a perfect size. We have 40 men and 30 women. There’s an intimacy about The Retreat, the same intimacy when Hazelden started. Hazelden had about 30 people in the Old Lodge. There’s a closeness that develops when you have a hundred people in some of the larger facilities. It’s intimate. It’s a boutique operation.
Power of Surrender: There is profound intimacy when a retreat only has about 30 people. The closeness that develops there is way more meaningful connections than in some of the much larger facilities.
It gives the experience of what it is to be a member of Alcoholics Anonymous. It gives the experience of what the importance and what the big book is. An awful lot of people go all the way through treatment paying very little attention. They receive a book, but they don’t interact with it much. The modality at The Retreat is to take people through the book and have them do the steps as they’re taken through the book. They walk out of here knowing what AA is. There are twelve meetings a week that are brought in at The Retreat. They walk out of here with a sponsor, a book, and where they’re going to go to AA.
That’s what the essence of the twelve-step program is. It is, in six words, trust God, try to figure out what God is of your understanding, a clean house, deal with our pain and our hurt, and then most importantly, as that young man did at lunch, help others. He said to us, “I didn’t want to be here.” All of a sudden, he had shining eyes, and he was able to serve us and serve others.
Almost everybody that is pushed into treatment, in their minds, they have a drinking problem or a drug problem but they don’t have any idea as to the psychological and spiritual damage that has been done and needs attention. Abstinence and not using is the tall pole in the tent. Over a period of time, you start to find out how faulty our thought process was, how self-centered we are, some of the basic spiritual concepts that are in the program, and this lack of self-centeredness. The change starts.
The change starts, but it happens slowly. You can’t do it like it was yesterday.
Surely but slowly.
Closing Words
Thank you so much for being here. This is the show presented by The Retreat here in Wayzata, Minnesota. If you ever have a need or look at different facilities that have a right to joy, we would welcome you at The Retreat. Bob, thank you for your faith. One more thing you can tell?
The other major difference, which is different than it was, that’s going on in the field is there’s a very strong movement towards medically-assisted treatment, which in a lot of cases is appropriate and necessary. We are an abstinence-based program. I couldn’t say that more strongly. We’re offering the classic experience of recovery with abstinence and physical, mental, and spiritual.
Sometimes, when we come into treatment and we’re so foggy in the head and it takes time for us to get out of the fog, that can be better clarity of a purposeful light, if I may be. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you again for tuning in to the show.